California Lithium Battery Inc. (CalBattery) announced at last week’s Department of Energy’s ARPA-e Energy Innovation Summit in Washington, D.C. that they have entered into a Work for Others (WFO) agreement with Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to commercialize a breakthrough low cost “GEN3” lithium battery. This new transformational battery will offer the highest energy density and longest cycle life of any lithium battery made today. CalBattery believes that it will be able manufacture this GEN3 lithium-ion battery in the US at a comparable cost reduction up to 70%.
VLF (Very Large Format) battery
This novel “GEN3” lithium-ion battery will combine Argonne’s silicon-graphene battery anode process with other advanced battery materials into the lowest lifecycle cost per watt lithium-ion battery ideally suited for energy storage and EV applications. The key technology advancement is CalBattery will become the first US battery manufacturer to be able to successfully use silicon in its battery anode. Silicon which has the ability to absorb lithium by a factor of 10X has until now not yet proven to be stable enough for battery anode use. While much research today is focused on ways to improve silicon stability, ANL tests indicate this newly patented process that embeds nano-silicon into graphene through a novel chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process will dramatically improve silicon stability by protecting the silicon material as it charges and discharges, extending battery cycle life by 3X.
The CalBattery Very Large Format form factor battery is ideally suited for grid-scale 1-25MW energy storage systems and/or in heavy-duty EVs. No other lithium, lead-acid, or flow-battery we have seen today can compete with CalBattery’s superior GEN3 lithium-ion battery in terms of easy maintenance, better performance and lower overall use cost.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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